Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Three bits of silliness from BBC News

1. The first related to a very serious and unpleasant story about a serial rapist. Nothing funny about that but the police have issued the least helpful identikit picture I have ever seen.

2. From Germany;

A large area near the town of Halle was cordoned off after a "flabby red, orange and green substance" was found by the road, Reuters reported.

Fire officers in protective suits spent two hours inspecting the substance before concluding it was jelly.


3. Following the non-news of higher obesity rates among people in the North of England as opposed to the South, the BBC opened an ill-advised Have your say forum entitled Why is the north fatter than the south? to which the comment most recommended by readers reads simply

Cos they ate all the pies.

David Morgan, Maldon.


The other responses are quite amusing, all the usual cliches about the North-South divide played out. The second best comment was from someone in London who argued that after the cost of housing and tax in the South (seemed to think Southerners paid more tax) people in the South simply couldn't afford to eat as much...

8 comments:

James Medhurst said...

I particularly like the 'Have Your Say' discussion about whether the Catholic Church should abolish the state of limbo. Saint Thomas Aquinas doesn't even get a mention.

Mary said...

Bah, "have your say" don't publish stuff I say.

Mind you, the last thing I sent them was about the gun debate - I described how multiple killings with a gun were easier and more efficient than multiple killings with a knife or a baseball bat because of the sheer slipperiness of blood on a struggling victim.

Actually I think I've just identified *why* they didn't post it...

I don't wish to nitpick (but I'm gonna), the font sizes in this post are all over the place. Can I propose a smallest size of 10-point?

The Goldfish said...

Oh most of Have Your Say is nonsense - and if I believed it representative of the way people in general think, I would be saving up for that flight to be moon. There's a great deal of venom expressed on there and not a whole lot of intelligent debate.

One gem I read a few weeks back about obesity or smoking or some such was "Only healthy people should receive treatment on the NHS."

Well, it would save a lot of money... And uh, yeah Mary. The slipperiness of blood on a struggling victim may have put a few people off their custard creams. ;-)

Sorry about the fonts in this post - it went particularly and inexplicably weird. However, it'll hopefully settle down. This post might have to stay like this though.

The Goldfish said...

...to the moon, I meant. To be moon? Sorry about that.

BloggingMone said...

That jelly story was in the German papers as well, but they referred to it as "jam" rather than "jelly". As I have never seen green jam before, I may as well have called the fire brigade in that situation. However, it was a good laugh, at least for those, who are not from Halle.

Mary said...

Font is much better now. As for "only healthy people should recieve treatment on the NHS, yes, I had a couple of perfectly serious people approach me on that topic after reading my blog... they actually hunted down my email address (which has never been openly available on my blog) to tell me that I was soaking up "more than my fair share" of NHS resources, that chronically sick people should have to either pay or go without, I was accused of being a bed-blocker (despite not having stayed in hospital since an appendix op aged 11), all sorts.

Some people seem to forget that they are talking to and about other human beings (sometimes justified by it being "only the internet" as if that made the people less real), and that it could be their spouse, their mum, or even them, who gets hit next.

The Goldfish said...

Actually, I remembered another classic one from Have your say. During the debate on the Muslim veil doo-dah, someone said that women who wore the veil were discriminating against deaf people who need to lip-read (which is not entirely untrue) but also against blind people who need to feel a person's face.

Need to feel a person's face?!

The Goldfish said...

Bizarre, Mary, totally bizarre.

You're right, people have no imagination - they have no imagination when it comes to the subject matter and they have no imagination when it comes to what they choose to do about it. However, so much is caused, in part, by misinformation.

Anyone with half a brain understands how tax works. You paid into an insurance policy, a collective insurance policy. You had a major bit of bad luck and now it is paying out. If you get well and go back to work in a few years, then pretty soon you are going to have paid in far more than you ever took out. And if you don't, then that doesn't matter. Other people pay in and are entitled to exactly the same privilege if they happen to be as unlucky as you were.

Could write more on this but I currently have no brain.